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Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
An English-language modernist group founded in 1914 that poetry based on description rather than theme, and on the motto, "the natural object is always the adequate symbol" [94] Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington: Dada: Touted by its proponents as anti-art, the Dada avant-garde focused on going against artistic norms and conventions [95]
Better safe than sorry; Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven (John Milton, in Paradise Lost) [8] Be yourself; Better the Devil you know (than the Devil you do not) Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all; Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness; Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to ...
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. [2] For example, in the English language , the words begin , start , commence , and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous .
Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates their own, possibly unique, text-related performance. The approach avoids subjectivity or essentialism in descriptions produced through its recognition that reading is determined by textual and also cultural constraints. [ 3 ]
In editorial practice, a trope is "a substitution of a word or phrase by a less literal word or phrase". [2] Semantic change has expanded the definition of the literary term trope to also describe a writer's usage of commonly recurring or overused literary techniques and rhetorical devices (characters and situations) [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] , motifs ...
Roget's Thesaurus is composed of six primary classes. [5] Each class is composed of multiple divisions and then sections. This may be conceptualized as a tree containing over a thousand branches for individual "meaning clusters" or semantically linked words.
An idiom is an expression that has a figurative meaning often related, but different from the literal meaning of the phrase. Example: You should keep your eye out for him. A pun is an expression intended for a humorous or rhetorical effect by exploiting different meanings of words. Example: I wondered why the ball was getting bigger. Then it ...